This invention relates to a simulated milk product with improved suspension characteristics in water and a method for its production.
The raising of young animals, particularly calves, requires the feeding of milk type products in order to replace the milk the young animal would normally have available to it from its mother. Products of this type typically are casein and whey mixtures with added amounts of fats, vitamins, and minerals. The product is produced in dried form for storage purposes and can then be reslurried in water prior to feeding to the animal.
Products of this type are excellent substitutes for milk from a nutritional standpoint but are not entirely satisfactory from a functional standpoint. In this regard, many of these mixtures have poor suspension characteristics in water and will not remain suspended after mixing thereby being unsuitable for feeding. This problem has been specially pronounced when proteinaceous ingredients other than casein are employed with the whey. Typically, these ingredients include vegetable protein ingredients such as soy isolates, soy flour or concentrates and the like. These products are even more difficult to disperse in water and retain good suspension characteristics than the casein materials. To overcome these problems, a number of techniques for modification of the milk replacer either with or without vegetable protein has been proposed. While these techniques are so numerous that a specific discussion of each variation is not possible, nevertheless, most techniques generally have involved some degree of physical modification or agglomeration of the milk replacer particles to improve their dispersibility in water. Alternative techniques have generally relied upon the addition of surfactants or other materials which will improve the dispersibility of these products in water. While many of these materials have improved the dispersibility or "wet out" characteristics of these products in an aqueous medium, the suspension characteristics of these materials remains poor. In this regard, suspension characteristics of the product is intended to refer to the ability of the product to remain in suspension in an aqueous medium for an extended period of time without precipitation or coagulation of the proteinaceous solids. This functional characteristic is contrasted with the dispersibility or wet out characteristics of the product which refers to the ability of the material to readily disperse in aqueous medium at the time of mixing.
It is necessary that these products have good suspension characteristics in addition to good dispersibility in water since the products often stand for extended periods of time prior to consumption by the animal. Unless they form a uniform suspension in water they will often be unusable for feeding.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to form a simulated milk product with improved suspension characteristics in water.
It is a further object of the present invention to form a simulated milk product with improved suspension and dispersibility characteristics in water.
It is a further object of the present invention to form a simulated milk product containing a vegetable protein ingredient with improved suspension characteristics in water.
These and other objects are achieved in the present invention as will be hereinafter described.